AIRO, April 15 — For the last two weeks, Essam al-Sayed has abandoned his normal social life. He no longer stops at his local cafe after work, gathers with friends or goes out to see his extended family. In place of such things, he said, there is only television.
From the time Mr. Sayed, 33, returns home at night, he and his wife sit and sample the endless Arab programming devoted to Israel's military offensive in the Palestinian territories. They turn off the set only when they hear the first call to prayer, at dawn.
"Every Arab is watching this closely," said Mr. Sayed, a neighborhood lawyer in Giza, just outside Cairo. "It may be worse for us even than Sept. 11 was for you — because it goes on and on. Every time you turn on the television, it's as though you were watching someone beat you."
The Arab world has never seen a television moment quite like it.
On both private satellite channels and state-run national networks, the plight of the Palestinians — portrayed as the victims of barbaric Israeli aggression — has saturated the news. The Palestinian cause has become a staple of religious programming, entertainment shows and even sports talk shows.
Cut to a commercial, and the images of broken Palestinian bodies and grieving Palestinian women are still there, in advertisements for one of the several Arab telethons that have been raising millions of dollars for West Bank victims.
"There is a constant flow of information now, all from the same perspective," said Hussein Y. Amin, an expert on the Arab media at the American University in Cairo. "It is on the national media, the local media and the satellite media. Every second, there is a new report, and there is only one message: solidarity with the Palestinians."
The television coverage has been a major factor in stirring Arabs' outrage at Israel and its supporters, especially the United States. The anger has even spilled over into resentment of some Arab governments, particularly those allied with Washington or at peace with Israel.
Yet it is a sign of the changes taking place that even some of the region's more authoritarian leaders have appeared largely powerless to turn down the volume. With private satellite channels like Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, blanketing the news, media analysts said, state-controlled networks must either follow suit or risk losing viewers.
Some observers compare the story's impact to the way television news reports from the Vietnam War shook Americans in the 1960's. While the scale of the violence in the West Bank might not rank with that of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 or Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the current Israeli offensive is, for the first time, playing out live in Arab living rooms.
That new intimacy, several Arab analysts said, is deepening the hostility that has long existed.
"The enmity between the Arabs and the Israelis has been there, but before, an Israeli was imagined in Cairo like someone on the moon — inaccessible, unseeable," a leading Egyptian intellectual, Muhammad Sid Ahmed, said in an interview. "Now, the hatred is closer."
The intensity of the coverage has also strengthened feelings of solidarity with the Palestinians in many countries where such support has at times been less substantial.
"It is as though we were there with them while all of this has been taking place," the director of the state-owned Syrian Satellite Channel, Alaa Nemeh, said from Damascus.
Like some other Arab stations, both Mr. Nemeh's satellite network and the government-controlled Channel Two have steadily cut back their entertainment programming since the Israeli offensive began, he said, replacing variety shows and sporting events with political programs and news.
Last weekend on the privately owned Saudi religious channel Iqra, a popular Muslim televangelist, Amr Khaled, departed from his standard discussion of the Sahaba, the companions of the Prophet, to exhort his viewers to keep the Palestinians' struggle at the forefront.
"Amid this crisis, a young man called to tell me about his feelings for a girl!" Mr. Khaled complained to his studio audience. "Is this the time for such a question? Your brothers are being killed! Your Islam needs you!"
The extent to which most Arabs have seen a conflict different from the one shown to Americans was evident right after a 20-year-old Palestinian woman, Andaleeb Tafafka, blew herself up last Friday in a Jerusalem market, killing six others as well.
The satellite news network Al Jazeera jumped on the story immediately. But as its cameras surveyed the grisly, chaotic scene, a Jazeera anchorwoman turned for context to a leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
"As long as the American, the Canadian and the Western Jews stay in our country, there will be no peace," the Hamas official, Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi, said.
CNN also cut quickly to the bombing scene, but its coverage was not quite the same. One of the network's crews had been nearby when the bomb went off, and its cameras arrived in time to catch bloody victims staggering for help, men shouting in rage and a middle-aged woman, shown repeatedly, wailing in the arms of rescue workers.
"It was horrifying," CNN's correspondent, Jason Bellini, said, describing one victim. "The body itself was not identifiable."
Minutes later, Jazeera was running an inset box with footage much like that of CNN.
Media experts noted that while Al Jazeera had been breaking new ground since it was founded in 1996 with a staff led by young veterans of the BBC, a big gap has remained between the news produced by it and a few other Arab satellite channels and the far less aggressive fare on the state-run networks watched by most of the region's poor. That gap, however, has all but disappeared in coverage of the Israeli offensive against the Palestinians.